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Our house was on a corner lot, and the front yard was unfenced. One summer the house across the street was rented out to a group of five or six male university students. I didn't know them and didn't see them often because of my work schedule.
But one Sunday afternoon they had a party, a beer blast that involved a lot of oversized young men drinking beer and playing touch football in their yard.
And then touch football in the street.
And then touch football in MY yard.
Now, I've never known how to confront anyone. We were raised to avoid confrontations. If it can't be swept under the rug, then suck it up yourself (although I don't think my mother phrased it quite that way).
So there I was, alone in the house, watching these big, noisy, boozing, young men encroach on my territory. They were completely harmless, I'm sure. But I was angry that they were in my yard.
I was sitting on the living room sofa listening to the Leontyne Price recording of Cosi Fan Tutti. As the players drifted across the street to my yard, the noisy touch football game began to interfere with the opera.
What were my options? I could ask the boys to leave. Or I could keep quiet and hope that they'd eventually go away. Given my timid nature, there was no way I could confront them, so my only choice was to wait and hope that they would drift back into their own space.
.
I decided to speed up the process. I cranked up the volume on the record player and opened all the windows on the first floor. The noise of the opera was deafening inside the house. And "Come scoglio" thundered out into the yard. Thundered! Leontyne Price louder than life-size.
I showed no mercy. More bass. More treble. More volume. Mozart filled the neighborhood.
After a short time, the game withdrew from my yard to the middle of the street, and from there back into the boys' own yard. By then I was too out of sorts to listen to the rest of the opera.
Would an actual face-to-face request have been as emotionally draining for me as cowering on my sofa waiting for Mozart to do the job? I can't answer that. We do what we can with what we have at any given moment.
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